Posted
by
samzenpus
on Wednesday August 13, 2014 @09:50PM
from the worst-laid-plans dept.

An anonymous reader writes A Florida man currently on trial for murder reportedly attempted to use Siri to garner ideas about where to bury the body of his dead roommate. According to police allegations, a University of Florida student named Pedro Bravo murdered his roommate via strangulation in late September of 2012 over a dispute involving Bravo's ex- girlfriend. According to a detective working the case, Bravo subsequently fired up Siri on his iPhone and asked it "I need to hide my roommate."

Sad thing about requiring college education whether the job needs it or not. You can fill a moron with facts, but not logic.

The body of Bravo's roomate was later found in a makeshift grave in a forest close to Bravo's apartment.

That is stupid.

Also of note is that investigators determined that Bravo, during the same time frame he asked Siri for advice on where to hide the body, also used a flashlight app nine times. Though circumstantial, the inference is that he used the flashlight on the iPhone to help him see as he disposed of the body.

Scary how shit like that is tracked in the phone. I use my flashlight daily, wonder if that makes me a suspect for something?

Yeah "Where do I hide a body" is an old Siri joke from launch. You used to be able to ask her that and she'd give you locations of nearest mineshafts, dumpsters and so on. It was just a bad taste demonstration of the backend search powers.

I call bunkum on this, and if it IS true, I'd personally want to send a "friend of the court" submission that its a pretty famous joke search and doesnt necessarily prove anything.

What actually happened is that the police forensically recovered that image from his iPhone 4...which isn't even capable of using Siri, since Siri is exclusive to the 4S and above. The image was apparently from the Facebook cache on his phone. Moreover, contrary to many of the reports, he isn't even the roommate of the victim.

The reporting on this issue has been rather appalling, and many of us have seen the same or similar screenshots and may have even had them cached on our phones as well, since they were circulating around the Internet back when Siri first came out. I even recall seeing a few YouTube videos making the same joke.

Whether or not he's guilty, I have no clue, but it's fairly safe to say that he likely didn't use his iPhone 4 to ask Siri anything at all, let alone where to hide his roommate, given that his phone couldn't even use Siri and he wasn't roommate with the guy that needed to be hidden.

Real reporters and the jury actually noticed that the accused had an iPhone 4 at the time, which DOES NOT support accessing Siri [unless jailbroken, of which there was no evidence supplied to indicate it was], AND that all the prosecution introduced was a screen-shot of the Siri request.

You know, the ones that were popular when Siri first was released and Siri would respond with something cute/weird/disturbing to cute/weird/disturbing questions....

So, I guess he drove to the woods, then fired up his web browser and put in 'Siri, I need to hide my roommate.", then saw the screen shot, saved it to his camera roll, then proceed to ignore the advice in the image with a "Fuck this, I'll just dump him here".

I live in Gainesville. This is a big local story. It's a tale of Dumb and Dumber. I wonder how the guy got in college.

1. I had already known he was using an iPhone on Verizon (look out for those pings!), but not until today did I see that delicious story in the Gainesville Sun that it was a Siri-looking screenshot. True or not, it seems to go great into the annals of Siri lore.

2. What Bravo did close to his apartment was hide the shovel; the burial was in a neighboring county. He didn't go to nice soft ground either: he had trouble digging through limerock.

3. He didn't bring a flashlight (though he did have three murder weapons prepared). An issue at trial was now much the battery charge went down during the time between when he turned off his phone's radio and when he turned it back on. They figured the murder and burial happened in that interval. If he had used a real flashlight, there would not be such a good trail to him.

4. He told the whole story to his jail cellmate. The flashlight may have been bright, but Pedro Bravo wasn't.

At the rate he's going, he'll soon have an address in Starke. That's in another neighboring county, but the reason he'd go there is not that it's close to Gainesville.

Wow. According to that story, the prosecutor did show a screengrab of an iPhone Siri query for this, but it was actually taken from the Facebook cache on the defendant's phone, meaning it was just a funny picture making the rounds on Facebook. I can't imagine why the judge let him show that, since it proves absolutely nothing, but it is a hell of a way to prejudice the jury against the defendant.